My Aunt Mamie died on Thanksgiving morning. She was 96. I wasn’t the best niece to her, and unlike my sisters, I rarely visited her in the nursing home. I also failed to make it to her funeral yesterday, so in an effort to do right by her for once in my life, I’m dedicating this post to her memory.

Although Aunt Mamie never had any of her own, she loved babies. Loved them, I say. If you merely showed her a photo of one, she’d immediately begin proclaiming her love to the pictured tyke and wouldn’t stop until she’d said, “God love your little heart,” and “I want to just eat you up,” a dozen or so times. But, oh man, if you showed her a real, live baby? And if you asked her to hold said real, live baby? Step back and watch the true love fest begin. Here’s Aunt Mamie with a four-week-old P.

I don’t know if you can see it in this picture, but at that very moment, Aunt Mamie’s head was on the verge of exploding from sheer joy. Good thing P could understand all that stuff about eating her up, because knowing P as I do, she would have been a little freaked out.

In a way, my sisters and I owe our very existence to Aunt Mamie, as she’s responsible for setting my parents up on their first date. According to lore, Aunt Mamie was afraid my dad would be intimidated by my mother’s advanced degree, so before that first meeting, Aunt Mamie reassured my dad by saying, “Now, Sara’s real educated, but don’t worry about that, because to talk to her, you’d never know it.” I guess that sealed the deal, because my parents were married a few months later.

To Aunt Mamie, baby lover and match-maker extraordinaire:  Rest in peace.

I should have learned my lesson but I didn’t.  My next massage was in Prague and cost $9.  Although, I didn’t feel as much like a bovine as I did after my Hungarian massage, this experience still left much to be desired.  For one, my Czech masseur blasted the entire Thriller album throughout the massage.  Sure, Thriller is a fantastic, culturally significant album, but appropriate for a massage?  Not really.  I returned to my youth hostel without the relaxed state I had been seeking.

My third massage was in a small Missouri town and cost $20 (an opening day special).   The problem with this experience was that my masseuse talked incessantly throughout the massage.  The topic of her blabber?  Her husband’s skin cancer scare.  Being the hypochondriac I am, I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly she had seen on my back that had made her husband’s lesions so salient to her.  Yet again, the price was right, but the massage?  Not so much.

We’re in a really nice groove right now, and I’m thoroughly loving life in China.  The first six weeks, however, were very, very stressful.  Chris and I both suffered from physical effects of this stress.  Chris developed a nasty case of shingles.  As for me,  my back muscles became so knotted that I began to look like I should be shuffling around a bell tower in a Parisian cathedral.  I decided to take care of my problem by visiting a local massage parlor.  One of my tour books describes the place I picked out as “the massage destination for the budget-conscious international student.”  Why haven’t I learned that BUDGET + MASSAGE = REGRET?

When I arrived at the massage parlor, I was met at the door by my masseur, who showed me to my room.  There, he gave me a plastic cup of water, some beef jerky, and a blue paper outfit to wear.  He then left the room for me to undress.  Here’s what the room looked like.

I know, it’s a little seedy looking.  I still had hope, though.

The massage began with a rather long forehead massage.  So far, so good.  From there, the masseur moved to my ears and proceeded to give me what amounted to a three minute wet willy (sans the spit).  One China expert I know suggested that the masseur was trying to release my chi with those ear canal shenanigans.  As a Westerner, ignorant to all things chi, I can’t say to what extent my chi was liberated, but I can report that I thoroughly washed my ears soon after returning home.

Next came the abdominal massage.  I’m pretty sure my masseur learned his technique for this part of the massage from the postpartum nurses demons I was assigned after the birth of P and Wee P.  It hurt!  According to my friend Patti, it’s believed that massaging the abdomen in a clockwise direction helps with diarrhea, whereas a counter-clockwise direction helps with constipation.  Since my masseur and I couldn’t communicate, and he couldn’t ask me about the state of my bowels,  I guess he decided to play it safe – he massaged mine in both directions.  Bonus.

There was no Thriller this time, but there was a TV.  I guess there was nothing good on at that time of day, because my masseur channel surfed much of the hour.

It seems I accidentally agreed to get a pedicure at some point, because in the middle of the massage, a small man dressed in a white lab coat entered the room wearing a face mask and carrying a old-fashioned, red doctor’s bag.  He took a look at my feet, said, “bu hou” (not good) and proceeded to use a chisel to cut my toenails down to the quick.  I shouldn’t complain much.  I think I needed this treatment, as my feet had started to remind me of something I had recently seen at a supermarket.

I’m just glad I didn’t accidentally agree to the treatment I’ve marked with a white arrow on the menu below.

When I came home and told Chris that I could have had a renal massage, he said, “You mean, like, your butt?  Is that legal here?”  “A REEnal massage,” I replied,  “You know, like, your kidneys.”  Can someone please tell me what a renal massage entails?  I asked my one doctor friend, and she was as clueless as I am.

You’ll be happy to hear that I’m considering in throwing in the towel on my quest for a great discount massage.  I think I’m done.  Of course, I say that now, but we’re spending next summer in Greece, and I remember my friend Chloe telling me about getting a decent Greek massage for around 75 cents back in 1994.  We’ll see…

]]> http://withfouryougeteggroll.com/?feed=rss2&p=704 2261 http://withfouryougeteggroll.com/?p=222 http://withfouryougeteggroll.com/?p=222#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:55:12 +0000 Christie http://withfouryougeteggroll.com/?p=222 Forgive the telegraphic nature of this post.  It’s 3:30 am and all four of us are wide awake.  P is in bed eating from a box of cereal proclaiming it to be the “bestest Chinese cereal in the world.”

We spent all day yesterday at the university figuring out our housing situation.  Since we didn’t get the keys until the late afternoon, we decided to spend another night in the hotel and move in today.  I’ll post photos of the joint as soon as I can.  We’re going to find out today if P will be able to get into the kindergarten on campus.  We were told months ago that it was full, but our fingers are crossed that some Chinese stings will be pulled for us.

We continue to be amazed at how well both girls are doing.  P has always been a great traveler, and it appears W Pee takes after her big sister.  They’re tired, though.

We don’t get a lot of snow here, so the last time P saw any was over a year ago in Boston.  She hated it.  In fact, she refused to let any part of her body, including her feet, make contact with it and she kept pleading with me to “bring back the grass.”  At some point in the last year, likely thanks to all her TV friends and their modeling of snow love, P decided to give the white stuff a second chance.

It snowed a couple of inches here the other night, and when P woke up the next morning, she was beside herself with excitement – snow angel excitement, to be exact.  With all the begging and screaming, it quickly became clear to me that there would be no peace in the house until I took her outside, so I wrapped her up in all her snow gear (minus the one glove we couldn’t find), and out we went.  P took three steps out the door, dropped to the ground, and exclaimed, “I’m doing it.  I’m doing it.  I’m making a snow angel!”  She then jumped up, took two more steps, and made another.  Then another.  Then she flipped her lid.  She was miserable, cold, and her exposed hand was purple.

Even after we were back in the warm house, and even after her right hand had regained its normal shade of pink, P continued to sob.  Suddenly, the true reason behind her utter loss of composure dawned on me.  It wasn’t just that she was physically uncomfortable.  She was also grappling with the fact that her lived experience of snow angel making had proved to be a stark contrast to her imaginings.  After all, she had derived her understanding of what the experience would be like from watching cartoons, and she had seen Calliou, Little Bear, and Franklin joyfully playing in the snow without a hint of discomfort.  When I realized what was actually going on in P’s mind, my heart broke for her. Even though it’s never easy to experience the disconnect between the ideal and the real, the first such experience is likely the hardest to take.

It’s possible that I empathized with P so fully because I’ve always been particularly bothered by these kinds of experiences.  I lived my teenage years with the unfortunate combination of being in the 1980’s and having straight, limp hair.  All my female idols, both TV stars and cool upperclassmen, had gigantic hair, and I coveted that stuff like nothing else I’ve ever coveted.  I was therefore thrilled and filled with hope when my sister offered to give me a home permanent.  I still vividly remember the trip to Walmart and the way I carefully studied the heads of the models on each box of perm paraphernalia.  I was certain that the following day, I would sport a head of hair identical to the lofty ‘do worn by the model on the box I had chosen, and all the way home from that shopping trip, I daydreamed about all the ways my life would change as a direct result of my new, elevated hair.  Unfortunately, those dreams were never realized.  Not only did my hair remain flat, a good portion of it fell out.  I was devastated and deeply grieved the loss my idealized, fully-coiffed self.

Although my current life expectations are thankfully a bit less superficial and vain than those of my teenage years, I continue to respond to disappointment with just as much emotion and deflation as I did then.  My husband, a voracious reader of Chinese philosophical texts, has long suggested I consider looking into Taoism for help in moderating those responses and overcoming my paralyzing worry.   Certainly, I would be a much happier person if I could follow the Tao and be more open to what life hands me, but old habits die hard, so I have a lot of work to do.  Just last week, someone sent me a link to a website that offers to email, for no charge, the Tao Te Ching in 14 weekly installments.  Maybe I’ll sign up.

As for P, I’m looking for a children’s version of the text for her.  Her life, no doubt, will be filled with plans and projects that will turn out differently than her dreams.  There will be sea monkeys that fail to wear crowns, boys who don’t call, and friends who move away.  What a gift she’ll possess if she can face those situations with acceptance and grace.  I’m imagining P’s future first grade teacher telling her class that recess has been canceled.  All the kids are freaking out and crying – but not P.  She sits calmly and says, “There is wisdom in this.”

More likely, though, knowing P as I do, she will use her knowledge of the Tao against me.  I’m now imagining P pooping her pants.  As I reprimand her, she says to me, “The Tao is vast.  Embrace its unfolding.”  Maybe I’ll hold off on the children’s version – at least until P is potty trained.

Ice, though, never particularly concerned me, and it never occurred to me that it could so thoroughly disrupt one’s life. I received my ice “schooling” in January 2007.  The freezing rain started around 5:00 one Friday afternoon, and by 9:00 that night, we began hearing limbs snapping and crashing to the ground every few seconds.  We continued to hear those sounds throughout the night and we eventually lost electricity.  Late the next morning, our then 19 month old sat on the couch, her lips slightly blue, saying “cold” over and over.  This convinced us to head to a hotel.  After the first night, our hotel lost its electricity.  After the second, there was no water, so we road out the rest of our 12 days without electricity at the home of a very generous and patient friend in a town 40 miles away.

I hear sleet hitting the roof right now and feel a great sense of relief.  It’s the silent, freezing rain, not sleet, that sticks to limbs and brings them down.  We’re going to be lucky this time.  My sisters in Arkansas, though, are likely to wake up to a mess.  As I was talking on the phone to one of my sisters tonight, I heard her kid, who was apparently looking out the window, exclaim, “Gracie just did the splits!”  Gracie is a Weimaraner.

We made it through our ice ordeal of 2007, but we’ll be looking at the visual reminders of that storm for many years.  I’m posting below a photo of our front yard that was taken in October 2006 and one that was taken during the ice storm a few months later.  I’m still far more freaked out by tornadoes than ice storms (though I doubt I’ll ever resort to tongue-speaking during either), but I now feel great empathy when I hear that people experiencing lots of ice.

My thoughts are with Gracie tonight.